Church in the Time of Coronavirus

This is a strange time to be Church.

I think it’s because, for most of us, this is so unprecedented. We’re so used to be gathering on a Sunday, to meet and sing and pray and learner, that when we can’t do that it leaves a gap, a hole, Sunday morning in limbo. Maybe that’s why COVID-19 feels so apocalyptic, in its technical meaning of ‘an unveiling’ – we appreciate our communities, we want to see those we care about, our friends and family, and this whole situation challenges this, shows where we need to become more resilient, exposes the weaknesses in our structures.

That last bit is important. In the middle of a global pandemic, we’re now scurrying to figure out what it means to be church in the time of Coronavirus. Sometimes that’s a positive – we pull together, we figure stuff out, we re-discover our ability to innovate and adapt and do things we never thought we’d do because they always felt too complicated, too expensive, too radical. At other times, though, there’s a darker flipside to all this – we retreat, become entrenched, get into debates and arguments about theology and sacraments and whose sin is to blame for all this. For good or ill, we’re all just trying to get through this, figuring it out as we go.

But here’s the thing – we need to remember that this is a privileged way of looking at things. Because if we look beyond the centre, if we turn our eyes to the horizon, if we seek out the spaces that have, shamefully, been pushed to the margins, we’ll find that many of the answers we’re looking for are already here.

The Church of God already includes those who are living in isolation, because of illness or rejection or imprisonment.

The Church of God already includes those who have practiced church in online spaces, because sometimes buildings and communities have been made inaccessible for them.

The Church of God already includes those who have been rejected, scapegoated, othered, because we’re too damn good at doing all of these.

All these are part of the Church’s collective memory, experience and knowledge, it’s just that most of the us have been painfully slow in accessing it all because it’s out there in the margins, in the corners, in the places we’re ignored or avoided, belittled or patronised. In the past I’ve used the phrase “Be a voice for the voiceless”, but that was naive – plenty of voices are already speaking words that can help us through this current crisis, but it means we have to cultivate the precious spiritual discipline of shutting up and listening.

I don’t want this to sound mercenary either. I want the Church to be stronger, yes, but we do this by practicing love, respect and humility, and by giving all our voices space to be heard and acted upon. Because quite often the Holy Spirit will be speaking through those voices; sometimes an apocalyptic unveiling is a good thing.

In I Corinthians 12, Paul describes the Church as a body made up of many parts, before pointing out that the parts of the body that have been dishonoured are actually those we need the most. That’s a message we need to hear over and over again, but particularly now.

So it’s a time to listen and to learn. Listen to disabled Christians who’ve created online church because our buildings are so often inaccessible. To our brothers and sisters who can’t meet together because of persecution or rejection. To those who who know how to make resources stretch because they don’t have any choice. To those who sound the alarm because they’ve already witnessed the darkness that can come in the aftermath of tragedy, and who know that we need to be speaking out for justice. It’s a time to listen to the teachers and the nurses and the cleaners and the binmen among us, because in a time of crisis, our theology needs to be embodied out there on the front lines. It’s a time to remember that a global pandemic is impacting a global Church, not just the corners of Christendom with the pointiest hats. It’s a time to repent of all the things we could have done to make church bigger and wider and more present but didn’t, not until it affected us personally. And, more than anything, it’s a time to stop shaming the Body of Christ and finally start listening and honouring all its parts, all its people.

Re-imagining What Your Church Should Look Like (1 Corinthians 12:12-31)

(I suspect this post will be a tad rambling and have more questions than answers – it’s a thinking aloud post, I’ll admit that up front. Maybe the answers are out there and I just haven’t encountered them in my limited experience which would, frankly, be awesome – please leave your thoughts in the comments section, especially if you’re involved in a radically different outworking of church.)

What does your church look like?

If you’re in the West, I can probably take a guess – chairs facing a central point from which the speaker delivers preaching and/or teaching, with space for some form of musical accompaniment roughly in line with this. There’ll be spaces for corporate activity of some sort and probably a kitchen. You might have pews or chairs, you might have a pulpit or a stage, but unless you’re a fresh expression or a cafe church, I’m willing to bet the description above is broadly accurate. Heck, it fits all the churches I’ve been involved in (so I guess this could be my bias coming through, and if it is, forgive me).

My problem is that I’m a traditionalist at heart but I keep having odd thoughts pop into my head, thoughts that don’t go away. I’m happy with sung worship and prayer times and sermons and social action, those things are good and valuable, but…

There’s a design principle which goes “Form follows function” – you figure out what a building is for and you design it around that. Broadly speaking, that’s why churches have roughly similar layouts – an area for a communal gathering that requires distinct areas for someone to speak and music to be played. That gives us halls and chairs. No problem, that makes sense.

But then we keep saying that the church is actually its people and their on-going relationship with God – our buildings are just shelters, convenient meeting places. And that’s true as well, but doesn’t that flip the principle above? When it comes to local churches, discrete groupings of individuals called by God into a particular place, is there an argument to say that function follows form? That one way of figuring out our corporate calling is by looking at the gifts held by the individuals making up the congregation and designing our meeting spaces around those gifts? Yes, a church will have key elements – worship, teaching, prayer, pastoral activities, social action, mission – but there are a hundred and one ways in which each of those can be expressed. One size doesn’t fit all and we shouldn’t expect it to – read 1 Corinthians 12, if all Christians are different, then all communities of Christians will necessarily look different as a result, right? Have key elements in common, definitely, but that’s not the same as homogeneity.

Yeah, yeah, I know, this isn’t the most radical or original ecclesiological thought any more. Smarter people than me have been thinking about this for years. However, we still prioritize certain gifts – preaching, worship leading, evangelism, children’s work – and while those things are hugely important, where does it leave you if God’s put you in a church full of engineers? Or storytellers? Or gardeners, or cooks, or people with additional needs, or if God’s raised up a congregation in a community where there are twenty churches but no library, where spiritual needs are fed but 200 local workers need retraining because a factory’s just closed down?

It’s been said that the voluntary sector in the UK would collapse if all the churches closed overnight – look at all the soup kitchens and youth clubs and coffee mornings that are run by churches, work out the sheer cost and resource that represents. And yet maybe there are even wider visions than that – why shouldn’t a church run a makerspace if it finds itself attended by a group of engineers or enthusiastic geeks following in Bezalel’s legacy? Young entrepreneurs arriving at church because of your youth work? Why not set up a business incubator? You’ve got a vestry and a new sound system; great, but do you also need a sensory room, or a bigger kitchen, or new art or an outdoor gym or a bigger greenhouse? Does it allow us to take all our gifts and use them in the service of Christ, or are we compartmentalising too much, leaving someone on the margins because she can’t play guitar but she’s been knitting scarves for sixty years and now just needs someone to help her get those scarves to the local homeless? We might just be catching up with Facebook and Twitter, but the digital natives on the fringes of our congregations are rolling their eyes because they’ve figured out the next big thing in social media – what do we do with that?

A shed on an allotment can be a church; heck, that’s something Ethiopian Christians might appreciate. A skate park can be a church. Because a church is a group of people who love and follow God with all their quirks and talents and eccentricities. And I’ll admit, sometimes in my darker moments, I’m terrified that God has given the church so many gifts and talents but we often lack the foresight and creativity to use them in the ways he’s asking us. Where two or three are gathered together, God is in their midst, and he’s big enough to have something unique for them to do in that very place. Sometimes what we think of as a ‘radical’, ‘different’ church really isn’t; God’s more creative than we are.

Maybe that’s why so many congregations are worn out – we’re so busy doing what we think God wants us to do, we’re actually missing his true calling and are therefore engaged in an uphill struggle without even realising it.

I guess it boils down to this – does your church look like your congregation or just what you think a church should look like? And does it help you to look more like God, growing visions and empowering mission that looks totally different from what we’re used to but that is still relevant and blessed because God is using and strengthening it?

And am I too comfortable in church or can I ask God to give me a radical, exciting, creative vision of my part in his kingdom?

 

 

(After I wrote this, I listened to a sermon by Mike Slaughter of Ginghamsburg Church, Ohio. In it, he spoke about how God worked with the things Moses already had – his belongings, history and talents – in other words, focus on what you’ve got, not what you don’t have, because God can and will use it. I think that ties in with what I was trying to get across with this post.)

 

The Power of We: One Body, Many Parts (1 Corinthians 12:12-31)

Today is Blog Action Day, the theme of which is ‘The Power of We’. Which, of course, got me thinking about community and how this relates to the Bible.

St. Paul hit upon a great metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 – a community, and here he’s talking about the church community, is a body:

“Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptised byone Spirit so as to form one body – whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free – and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.And so the body is not made up of one part but of many.”

Communities aren’t homogenous, even if they might look it at first glance – they’re a mixed-up, messed-up interaction of personalities and perspectives. It works, even if sometimes everything seems on the brink of flying apart.

That was the early church. The huge theological debates – how Jewish should Christianity be, should Gentiles be a part of things – were flash points enough, but look at the demographics – a mixture of classes, ethnicities, genders, lead by former radicals, collaborators and murderers. Somehow this group became a community that faced down emperors and fed the hungry.

There’s a lesson there, about the unity of the Holy Spirit and the importance of the church as the Body of Christ. Those are things that are always worth bearing in mind.

But look at that description of the early church again. Some followers of Jesus were former tax collectors, collaborators and fraudsters. Some were Zealots, terrorists or sympathisers with terrorists, and even if we’re more inclined to think of them as ‘freedom fighters’, that still makes us uncomfortable. And some followers once looked after the coats as early Christians were turned into martyrs. These people, on the margins of polite society due to their actions or their beliefs, became the leaders of the church, integral members of this new community. After all, sometimes community is an act of grace.

As Paul said, each part of the body needs all the others. People need to pray and preach and lead worship, sure, but people also need to clean the toilets and put the bins out. And the ideal of Christian community is that each of these roles is valued and honoured – with the people cleaning the toilets perhaps receiving greater honour from God because of their humility and relative anonymity.

(This sort of stuff also ties in with servant leadership and remembering the Sabbath…)

But here’s the thing. We’re living in a world where some branches of Christianity are based around who’s out rather than who’s in, ostracising based on a legalistic rule book or neighbourhood gossip. And the minute you ostracise someone, push them to the sidelines because their face doesn’t fit, you deal a body blow to the church; the kingdom isn’t allowed to be all that it could be, with all the consequences associated with that.

You want someone out of your fellowship because they don’t meet some arbitrary standard? Well, that’s down to you, but, to extend Paul’s metaphor, you’ll be cutting off your nose to spite your church’s face.

But that’s negative, and as it’s Blog Action Day, let’s celebrate the positive. The church, at its best, is an awesome community, bringing together those who’d normally remain apart and rehabilitating back into community those who are in need of grace. The power of God is seen through the power of we. That’s worth celebrating.